Episode 215 - Transcript

So please listen to at LEAST last episode before this one…but a couple episodes ago I brought up Heidegger in relation to Neitzsche…and I said that a CLASSIC, Heidegger style question that really shows the DIFFERENCES between him and Nietzsche is that he asks: is it possible…to think WITHOUT the will. 

Meaning IS it a part of our thinking…to NOT ONLY be able to have freedom OF the will, to be able to WILL yourself ON to situations when you choose to. But beyond freedom OF the will… is there also a freedom FROM the will, that’s an IMPORTANT part of our thinking?

Now what this question REFERS to… is Heidegger’s LATER work. After Being and time. After Dasein. After SHOWING the limitations of ONLY framing things in terms of subjects and objects, WILLING ourselves onto reality– AFTER that… he moves on to a very interesting STAGE of his philosophy…where the MAIN thing that HE wants to explore in his work…is what he calls “releasement” or “letting-be”. Let’s talk MORE about what that might look like. 

See if the WORLD around us, to Heidegger, is made up of a bunch of people that have a technological enframing of everything…where every thing and every one is just an OBJECT that we need to WILL ourselves ONTO, let’s STRUCTURE things, let’s manipulate them, optimize them… and if BY DOING THAT it LEADS to a world where we’re CONSTANTLY seeing EVERYTHING in terms of how to manipulate people to produce the most efficient outcome. Then what would happen if someone decided there was MORE to life than DOING that all the time? 

What if someone didn’t BUY the whole sales pitch… that you’re a BAD PERSON if you aren’t constantly trying to educate yourself about the problems of 7.5 billion people…what if there’s MORE to what we ARE… than constantly trying to SAVE the WORLD all the time through rational utilitarianism. 

What if somebody INSTEAD decided to focus on trying to understand the nature of their OWN BEING better– putting in the work to MAYBE try to uncover a far more meaningful, richer, FULLER experience of what it is to even EXIST? 

Well first of all: REAL question. Should this person have to apologize for spending their time in this way? 

In other words IS this just a poorly disguised move of a SELFISH person… who’s ignoring all of the REALLY important work we have to do of projecting ourselves onto the world and fixing it?

Or COULD this more MEANINGFUL connection with the world… be something that we’re sadly MISSING in the modern world…something people have not only FORGOTTEN as they spiritually DROWN every day in their political video game…but could it be something that EXPLAINS why Heidegger’s Dasein we talked about last podcast…could ever BE such a foreign concept for most people to wrap their heads around. Is a pre-theoretical, more immediate connection with our existence just a bunch of religious nonsense? Or are there things SPECIFICALLY ABOUT the type of modern world that we’re living in…that PREVENT people from accessing this kind of experience more often?

Releasement or letting-be to Heidegger… is going to involve us going from the standard subject/object framing of things…freedom OF the will in the Nietzschean sense…to freedom FROM the will, more along the lines of the work of people like Simone Weil. 

But still…if I’m GONNA get on BOARD with this whole idea, Heidegger…you’re still gonna have to convince me that this is all possible. I mean what EVIDENCE do we have of the fact that ANYONE is EVER operating outside the framing of subject/object? What…a bunch of people reporting their own experience of it? What…we talking about religious mystics that take drugs and go horseback riding with Jesus in a vision? You know as a modern, scientifically minded person that DOESN’T do drugs…how am I supposed to take any of this stuff seriously?

Well since you brought it up, hypothetical person…let’s talk about mysticism today. Wasn’t the plan or anything. But look: if you wanted to find a GATEWAY IN to this more immediate connection to being that people are claiming to have throughout history…well, there’s MANY different GATEWAYS you could say– and ONE of the pieces of low hanging fruit here… is going to be the long tradition of what’s come to be known as mysticism. 

Now there’s actually QUITE A LOT to what mysticism is. You could spend decades reading about it and have only really touched a PIECE of the kinds of profound experiences that people have said they’ve gotten to. 

And to be clear: today’s episode is not supposed to be an overview of mysticism in full, as though that’s even possible… what it is though: is an attempt to clear up some common misconceptions about mysticism, how it’s been framed as irrational, delusional, the antonym to philosophy…and the hope is to open someone’s mind up to the importance of mysticism as one of these potential GATEWAYS…OUT of some of these narrow-thinking TRAPS we sometimes fall into specifically in the modern world. 

We’re going into ALL of this in detail. And the vehicle today for DOING this…to give this podcast some structure…are gonna be SOME of the arguments making a CASE for mysticism…from the philosopher Simon Critchley’s new book on Mysticism. 

Know I’ve been talking about the guy a lot lately…the episode we did on Greek Tragedy and the tragic perspective…mentioned his work last time talking about Heidegger…I’ve just been reading his work a TON this last month for this particular arc of the show: the guy is a scholar of Heidegger’s work, he thinks Being and Time is one of the most important books of the last 100 years, and we’ll see WHY today…and much LIKE in his book on tragedy… where he’s trying to make this different way of viewing the world more accessible, you know, something a little less LIMITED to the idealism that people typically frame things in terms of. Well this book on Mysticism is ANOTHER installment in that same kind of effort. 

In a WORLD… where we DON’T HAVE an IDEALISTIC way of framing reality anymore…does that SENTENCE us to LIVES where we have no meaning or purpose connected to anything? 

Well if you wanted to think in a DIFFERENT way where things DIDN’T seem so alienated…how would you DO that in a secular way? Greek tragedy, Heidegger, Mysticism…these are three approaches that Simon Critchley has dedicated a significant portion of his time here on this earth trying to open people’s minds up to. 

Now…how bout this question from the hypothetical skeptic from before: as a modern person… how are you supposed to take ANYTHING someone says SERIOUSLY…who CALLS themselves a mystic? I mean isn’t that the LAST thing you’d ever want to put on a job application?

Well the FIRST step in digging into this area is gonna be to say…that MOST of these people throughout history that we would call “mystics” today…didn’t in fact THINK OF THEMSELVES…as mystics. Simon Critchley says in the book: MYSTIC is a word that was actually created fairly RECENTLY, AROUND the 1700’s…and it was created in a VERY specific cultural climate that was hostile TOWARDS the more religious approach that many of these “mystics” were immersed in. 

This is around the time of Immanuel Kant. Critchley says Kant and people like him around this time thought that philosophers… were kind of like the policemen of THINKING. That it’s a philosopher’s job… to PROTECT us from all the dogma and the fanaticism out there. So anybody claiming to be walking around having religious experiences that can’t even really be DESCRIBED using ordinary language…well we’re SKEPTICAL of that kind of stuff: THESE people are gonna be a PROBLEM. 

Critchley thinks this misunderstanding that was taken up by MANY thinkers from around this time has led to the term “Mystic” being used, at least in philosophy circles…ALMOST as an insult. 

Mystics are irrational, they can’t even EXPLAIN what they’re experiencing! Mysticism is just where you go if you’re a CHARLATAN and you have nothing ACTUALLY useful to say– you just go HIDE behind a bunch of flowery sounding WORDS and hock your latest video course.

But again it should be said…the REALITY when it comes to mysticism…is that almost ALL of these people that we would call MYSTICS today didn’t CALL themselves that…and they ALSO weren’t people that thought of themselves as OPPOSED to REASON in any way. None of these people were IRRATIONAL…like they weren’t born, they looked around them, hmm too much REASON in this world around me. I think I’ll be a MYSTICAL kind of person…wear a wizards hat around everywhere. 

No MOST of these people were ACHIEVING what we now call “mystical experiences”...by devoting themselves to a highly RATIONAL engagement with the texts and practices of their time. 

For example, medieval Christian mystics like St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross…these are people that devoted MULTIPLE HOURS, everyday of their LIFE to contemplative prayer and rational meditation. In the Jewish tradition, Kabbalists would spend YEARS of their life… decoding and contemplating the meanings HIDDEN in Hebrew scriptures, DEEP rational engagement with these texts EVERY DAY. SUFI mystics practiced dhikr, where they would repeat divine names over and over again in specific, highly structured ways, just to try to cultivate MORE clarity and stillness. Point is: this is NOT the picture of someone HOSTILE towards rationality…this is the picture of someone HIGHLY COMMITTED to a devotional practice that they gave EVERYTHING they HAD to– and these are just a FEW examples of MANY. 

So if mysticism isn’t about REJECTING rationality, like philosophers of the PAST might have us believe…then what is it REALLY about if we’re clearing the air here?

One of the things Critchley says that’s important to consider…is just how DIFFICULT it is to DEFINE something like mysticism. BECAUSE we’re talking about people from such DIFFERENT points in history with different cultures, religions, languages…on one hand it’s DIFFICULT to put them all into one basket and say that they’re the same thing…but on the OTHER hand when you listen to what they were DESCRIBING in their testimonies…there’s enough of an overlap between what they say that we can DEFINITELY say there’s SOMETHING these people were witnessing that’s along the same lines. 

And If we HAD to give an example… of a type of COMMON mystical experience just for the sake of this episode: Simon Critchley might like as a starting point the description given by the theologian Bernard McGinn who says that mystical experiences typically fall into two different categories.

One is where someone transcends the self…and experiences a feeling of unity or communion with the divine or something greater than themselves. The other is in the opposite direction: where the self dissolves or is pushed aside; similarly making ROOM for an experience where the normal lines are blurred between ourselves and something greater that we’re all a part of. 

Now, after GETTING to here…mystics will OFTEN report all SORTS of emotions that then flood over them…from a deep feeling of peace, to ecstasy, to love, to awe and connection, to even fear– as they are HIT with something that feels on one hand: so alien to their normal everyday experience, but DEEPLY real, most of them say it feels MORE real than reality, and significant in a way that feels IMPOSSIBLE to fully put into words. 

Now real quick, something that needs to be said…before we proceed with this definition…there are MANY different TYPES of mysticism, that APPROACH these experiences from different premises than this one. SOME types of mysticism… will even STEER INTO the self as a starting point.

What we’re laying out here, focusing on the boundaries of the self, is just again, a very COMMON type of mystical experience that people ALL across history have described: and it’s arguably the BEST place to START if we want to have a frame of reference for the rest of the conversation OPENING people up to this being more than just religion. Just saying: don’t LIMIT yourself to ONLY this definition if you keep reading about this stuff, but this is the one we’re working with here today. 

THAT SAID: No matter HOW scientific of a person you are, when you HEAR about SO many people from history across cultures HAVING a common EXPERIENCE like this one we just described…you have to ask: is your theory…that this is just a bunch of delusional monkey brains, collectively tripping on a religion? Or ARE these people REALLY having an experience…with something that they’re DESCRIBING as the divine? As something beyond rational comprehension or words?

And the question Simon Critchley wants to ask is JUST using SECULAR language here to start out: if this WAS a type of aesthetic experience that was AVAILABLE to you as a person, in THEORY. Would you be interested in EXPERIENCING it if you could? Would you WANT to feel an utterly transformative connection to the divine IF that was something that was possible?

And I gotta imagine a LOT of skeptics out there might say back, uh yeah. I guess. But what are we even TALKING about here? The PROBLEM’S not that I don’t WANT to feel this way…the PROBLEM is that there’s nothing OUT there that’s what you’re calling the divine. I mean if somebody says my self has dissolved away and I’m feeling a connection with God…SHOW ME THE MAN IN THE SKY with a staff that they’re TALKING to or else I’m tempted to file this one under the delusional monkey category myself. In other words: show me the MATERIAL, CAUSAL explanation for this DIVINE thing that they’re experiencing or else what, are we just ABANDONING the notion that our experiences have to correspond to some reality?

And while this is an understandable response from the subject/object framing of things…to Simon Critchley this MISSES the POINT of what’s even being TALKED about in this more Phenomenological framing of things, where the SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE ITSELF is what we’re studying…not how mental events CORRESPOND to some material CAUSE.

Put another way: when I am HIGHLY committed to a devotional practice for months or years of my life. When I am doing DEEP readings of liturgical texts EVERY DAY, when I am doing hundreds of hours of meditating, praying, visualizing, fasting, being in solitude, sitting in nature with the intention of surrendering the boundaries of my self over to allow space for something greater to reveal itself in a moment…when I FEEL the sense of overwhelming connection to everything and everyone around me, when time dilates and feels almost like it ceases to exist, when something expands out of me that feels NOT like I’m tripping, but like I’m actually SEEING things for the first time WITHOUT the filters on and it feels very difficult for me to explain what it is I’m experiencing in rational terms…is that EXPERIENCE that I’m having…not real? Is it LESS REAL… than the objects that are in the world? Real question. 

I mean, subjectively…this IS a real experience I am having– it’s one that many OTHER people have had historically. And from a phenomenological perspective…subjective experience is something that’s WORTHY of being studied…simply in its own RIGHT. 

But STILL you could ask: but what’s the THING, what’s the OBJECT in the world that is CAUSING that experience you’re having? And if you call it GOD…well then where is that GOD in the world?

Well the bottom line is this: the VALIDITY of this type of experience comes down NOT to whether it connects to some CAUSE in the material world. The REALITY of this goes ON at the level of subjective transformation. So the more RELEVANT question then becomes if you’re studying it: NOT what is the material CAUSE of it…but IS there a devotional practice that is possible…that can reliably LEAD human beings to this TYPE of subjective experience? Can we GIVE people this subjective experience? Is a state of consciousness like this something that we can cultivate?

But see Critchley would wanna stop you right there using words like consciousness. And as we know from last episode Heidegger ALSO wouldn’t want to bring this kind of word in to describe what it is we’re talking about. It just reduces what this IS to something that brings in FAR too many dualistic assumptions about the mind being separate from the body. 

But maybe there’s a way here… to use the IDEA of consciousness…to open someone up that’s skeptical of this whole line of conversation… to things that aren’t very easily described by rationality alone. And I think it’ll help us see what can be problematic specifically about the tendencies in our modern world. 

So everybody that’s listened to the consciousness episodes of the podcast knows that consciousness… is one of the most mysterious and exciting things that we have to study in the sciences these days. TONS of different theories about it, nobody’s solved the hard problem of consciousness yet… and you can hear things like the multiple drafts model that talk about how consciousness is maybe DOZENS of parallel processes all intersecting at a particular point, where it’s very difficult to estimate HOW these things are in communication with each other, HOW much of consciousness is subconscious process, how much of consciousness is really an illusion. 

You can start to CONSIDER how MYSTERIOUS the concept of consciousness even IS…and THEN you can go a step further: you can realize that consciousness, is REALLY…just a word. 

It’s a label we came up with… that tries to RATIONALLY CONSTRICT something that’s possibly too complicated to ever tie DOWN with rational language. It’s possible we’re using ONE word here…to describe 100 things that intersect and could be studied more accurately at an individual level. It’s possible there are things that we’re lumping IN under the banner of “consciousness” that are just NOT things that can even be STUDIED at the subject/object level, things of a type like the existential structures of Dasein from last episode. 

Now you can say back to this well, so what? This is what we DO in the sciences. We need a word that we can use to START having these conversations. And then over time with a better understanding our words will improve, the way we TALK about it will become more sophisticated. This is how the history of science works. 

Well look: NONE of this is to put science down. This is simply to illustrate that the universe out there, REGARDLESS of whether our words are sufficient to be able to describe it…the universe is just GOING ON…ALL The time…always moving, in ALL of its unbridled, enormous complexity. 

And JUST because we have a word that we use to describe a set of phenomena…doesn’t mean that it’s encapsulating all of it. In fact, rationality just in general…is a constricting type of process. We are ALWAYS trying to use RATIONALITY, to CRAFT a CONCEPT that is MANAGEABLE for human minds to comprehend and work with as we go throughout our lives. And here’s the larger point: the TYPE of rational terms we have to experience the world with…play a part in determining the phenomenological experiences that are POSSIBLE for us to have.

Let me explain this point a bit more: of COURSE we know that with Heidegger…he would think that when it comes to a word like consciousness…part of the reason its SO surrounded by mystery and what can seem like paradoxes is because it’s ultimately a category error: we’re trying to describe something in the ontological realm PURELY with words and rational constrictions that only make sense in the realm of the ontic, subjects and objects. 

That there seem to be hard LIMITS… to what rational parameters like words…can ever hope to describe. 

But consider this applied to these mystical experiences we’re talking about more generally. Simon Critchley says when you consider the list of people who have claimed to HAVE these experiences that we have records of. People like: Julian of Norwich, she was a medieval Catholic, Meister Eckhart he was Dominican monk, Rumi who was a Sufi mystic, Marguerite Porete she was another Christian.

One thing that starts to seem CLEAR he says… if you just look at the examples…is that having a concept in the way that you frame the world…for the divine, or for God, or for something greater than yourself, JUST having the CONCEPT AVAILABLE to you in the way that you frame things…seems to HIGHLY increase your CHANCES…of HAVING one of these mystical experiences that LEAD to this deeper connection with being.

And it’s like okay… if I believe in a leprechaun its way easier to believe there’s a pot o gold at the end of a rainbow. But what does that have ANYTHING to do with MY reality?

Well think about how as a modern, scientifically minded person…what our TENDENCIES often are for categorizing the types of experiences we have. If you’re out on a hike or something, you’re walking along a trail, you see the sunlight shooting through the trees around you, you feel the wind on your face, you smell the trees and the dirt, and you’re coming up to a clearing, and when you witness the view at this clearing, the rolling hills just as far as the eye can see like just a carpet of life that you’re somewhere in the middle of just lost within it…if you were to FEEL a sense of overwhelm start to come over you, just a humility, a wonder at what the heck all this even is, and you feel that wonder start to build, and then you feel it start to take you into some other direction that feels really weird…what do we often DO in this kind of moment? 

We INSTANTLY start trying to rationally subordinate the moment and the feelings going on…and turn them into things we can understand, manipulate and optimize for efficiency. This feeling of overwhelm…well I DID only get about six hours of sleep last night, so everythings a little much for me today. Huh-huh. And that curiosity that I feel is really something that’s a survival mechanism for me trying to get knowledge about my environment. And that humility, well my step-dad WAS pretty hard on me when I was a kid so OF COURSE my first instinct would be to feel humble in the face of something so powerful. It’s like NOWHERE here was there EVER an opportunity…for you to feel a part of ANYTHING deeper. You were always just keeping it at arms length through rationally categorizing it into something you can control. 

Simon Critchley has an entire confession section in the book on Mysticism where he DESCRIBES one of these experiences of letting constant doubt and never being vulnerable to PREVENT him from FEELING something that was maybe life changing in one of these moments. This is a common place we can FIND ourselves in.

COUPLE this with ANOTHER place we often FIND ourselves in the modern world. ANY TIME you get five seconds to sit and just BE with the world around you and pay attention to it…you’re scrolling on your phone. And the STUFF we’re left to scroll through is often something that is such a SHALLOW take of reality…how could it EVER offer a perspective shift? It’s often designed PURPOSEFULLY to reinforce your bias… and get you even FURTHER locked in to the narrow way you’re framing things. 

With how much media is designed to just make you SCARED all the time and constantly worried about the future…how could you EVER…SUMMON the vulnerability in your experience of things that is REQUIRED to have one of these experiences…if you are CONSTANTLY needing to keep SHIELDS up to feel like you’re protecting yourself? Critchley says that adulthood, just in GENERAL as most people live these days…adulthood is what he calls the abdication of ecstasy…we live SO much of our LIVES as adults obsessing over ourselves and our own egos…that it makes it next to IMPOSSIBLE for us to experience this entire other side of what life can be. I mean for MOST people that are alive today that are “responsible adults”...when are we ever in a place where we’re NOT doing something? When are we ever in a situation where we can just put ASIDE everything for a while…and FEEL some of this juicy, no-self ECSTASY that Critchley’s talking about. It's INCREDIBLY rare. 

Now CONTRAST this with what it was like to live as some of these devoted religious followers that have claimed to have these mystic experiences. 

Imagine Julian of Norwich. She was someone who lived through the Bubonic Plague, she was tucked away, in a tiny cell as what’s called an anchoress, spending MOST of her time devoting herself to contemplation or prayer, her life cut down to the absolute essentials—silence,` solitude, scripture, and the rawness of her own thoughts. Imagine living a life like THAT, how much would INSECURITY rule your life? 

Or take Meister Eckhart. He was a Dominican monk who lived during a time where to BE an intellectual anywhere CLOSE to the realm of philosophy…involved you spending THOUSANDS of hours of your life DEEPLY studying the religious texts that dominated the halls of thought at the time. In other words: you didn’t have a CELLPHONE to turn to. You just sacrificed a big piece of yourself… OVER to this near CONSTANT process of religious contemplation. 

So anyway: PART of the reason I even bring this UP is to say that if you have a HARD TIME getting to a place that one of these people are describing…don’t be too hard on yourself I mean you’re living in a world that makes it incredibly difficult to gain access to this in the first place. But SAY you STILL really WANTED to. You say: I’m gonna FIND some time, I’m gonna MAKE this experience happen.

STILL you could be in a PLACE where you’re like okay, FINE…but as you SAID this stuff is WAY EASIER if you already have a belief in some sort of higher power…but maybe I DON’T have a belief in any of that stuff. Look, I don’t believe in god objectively, phenomenologically, uh…ergonomically, ANY of them. How am I ever supposed to get to a place like Meister Eckhart, nice NAME by the way, who from the moment he was saying his ABCs is VIEWING himself in terms of how he relates to God’s kingdom? That’s just not something I have at my disposal here.

Well one thing Critchley might recommend is to NOT see this as a zero sum game. Where you’re either HAVING a mystical experience, feeling a total dissolution of the self, or else you’re not having ANYTHING. There are many different SHADES of mystical experiences…and it may in fact be NECESSARY for you to experience these things at a LOWER level of intensity before it’s possible for you to navigate to the places of these FAMOUS mystics who people are still talking about.

And ESPECIALLY if you’re lacking religious language to help you NAVIGATE and UNDERSTAND the feelings you’re having in these experiences…developing this type of connection is DEFINITELY going to be a process. Still…if you WANTED to start somewhere…Simon Critchley thinks you’re ACTUALLY living in one of the most PRIVILEGED times to be able to ACCESS this sort of stuff. 

Reason BEING he says is that it USED to be that to have one of these mystic experiences…you would NEED to be a devoted follower of a religion of some sort. But he says something HAPPENED, notably after the Protestant Reformation in the western world…where these experiences became sort of democratized in a way that had never really been available before. 

All of a sudden it was POSSIBLE for someone to FEEL variations of these things…through ARTWORK and aesthetic experiences more generally. All of a sudden things like POETRY…became a type of expression that MOST people who were interested could pick up and read…and USE it as an access point into experiences that can help us see the limits of a purely rational understanding of the world. 

You know it’s not a coincidence…that so many of the people we’d call mystics from the history of the world have turned to poetry as a way to try to express these experiences when normal language doesn’t seem to do the trick. Heidegger, also, in his LATER work makes a similar move. He says so often the LANGUAGE that we use FRAMES reality in terms of the ontic– every SENTENCE we SAY is STRUCTURED in a way that is about subjects…acting on and manipulating a realm of objects. John emptied the trashcan. Susan got a new job. 

But see: Poetry is a type of art that opens things up to a whole different KIND of expression…because so often poetry is written FROM a human, subjective point of view. The HUMAN experience is often PRESUPPOSED when you’re reading a poem. Take ONE example of this from an excerpt of a poem called the great wagon by the legendary Sufi mystic, known as Rumi. Compare the subject/object sentence structure to the way that HE writes:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.”

The story’s the SAME from so many mystics over the course of history. Whatever it is they’re experiencing in this place where the self dissolves and they’re always, already a part of something bigger that they can’t really express…POETRY…just feels to them like it gets a BIT closer than ordinary language does. 

But Simon Critchley says IF you were a modern person, with ALL the resources typically available to us…there’s NO REASON for you to RESTRICT yourself just to POETRY if you wanted to EXPLORE this stuff more deeply. 

He says in the book: that there’s no such thing as an atheist when you’re listening to music you love. In other words: MUSIC he thinks is another very effective ACCESS point into this area. Because as he says in a world that’s often completely SHAPED by money and disenchantment…music becomes something that REANIMATES it. You can just LOSE yourself in listening to a song… at a level that involves a kind of surrender of the ego…this is SIMILAR to a mystical experience. 

Now, don’t get him wrong. He’s not saying it’s the same. He’s not saying this equates to following a devotional practice…but look if you wanted to use the tools you have as a modern person to start moving in this direction a bit more…you could DO a lot WORSE than trying to push yourself aside and feel music as deeply as possible. And as a musician himself it’s one of these gateways into this more immediate experience with reality that he personally has a lot to say about in the book. 

Another access point Simon Critchley talks about…is the power of a deep reading of a philosophical text, as a substitute for one of these religious texts. Once again, it’s not the SAME thing. But taken SERIOUSLY enough…if you READ a work of philosophy with some humility, if you’re TRULY working to surrender yourself OVER to the process of internalizing these ideas, particularly the type of philosophy that tries to challenge the limits of human thought…this DEFINITELY has the potential to get you MORE into this place where you’re “letting-be” and ALLOWING ideas and new ways of thinking to reveal themselves. Probably MANY people listening to this that can relate to how transformative something like that can be. Now imagine it with theological guidance and language to help navigate the experience better. 

I guess the thruline here that needs to be said: is that it’s highly unlikely you’re just going to listen to a song one day or read some new philosophy book and just fall on the ground and start convulsing. My life is CHANGED! No JUST like I was saying last time with Heidegger’s philosophy this change often goes down most of the time in small increments, over the course of months or years, with little openings going on, prying you more and more in the direction of seeing things without so many filters on all the time. 

And yes, meditation, nature, fasting, prayer, religion, reading, music ANY of these things and MORE can be a move in that direction of getting a little more freedom FROM the will…and it’s MY belief that this book by Simon Critchley is written to be ANOTHER one of these things that can start a shift in your thinking towards this direction. He goes over a TON of examples of the STORIES of these mystical experiences– ALWAYS with the modern reader in mind, sympathetic to the fact that it’s such a difficult thing to access just because of the default way our modern world is situated. 

But beyond any PERSONAL benefit somebody might get from reading it…I think the book ALSO does a great job of showing how an area of human thought like MYSTICISM…is again, NOT irrational. Mysticism is a tendency more than ANYTHING to Simon Critchley. And that while over the years it’s been slandered and made into something like the antonym to philosophy…from HIS vantage point it’s actually an area of human thought that has become highly NEGLECTED because of this misunderstanding…and that since we’re already in this place: mysticism ACTUALLY has a lot of ways it could benefit human thought if we were more open to it. 

Anyway the book is called On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy. Hope you enjoyed this one. Let me know if you would be interested in exploring more about these different framings of reality. Always have wanted to do the Kyoto School, it’s a unique blend of eastern and western philosophy that was done in the 20th century. Some REAL philosophical beasts that were part of the Kyoto school…but I’d need to know if you were interested in hearing about it before I’d ever go down that road. Let me know if you get a second this week.